ABSTRACT
Nearly 2500 years ago, Plato wrote of a symposium about love. This symposium was attended by Socrates, the founder of “maieutic” philosophy, a name owing to the comparison of his profession to that of his mother, a maia, meaning midwife in ancient Greek. The kind of relational continuity of care that midwifery could have represented in ancient times is something that we have long lost. The symposium below, written 2500 years later, is an attempt to reconceive of care for fertility, abortion, pregnancy, and parenthood. Through a combination of hauntology, critical fabulation, and decolonial empirical methodology, a specter of care is staged in the figure of midwife Phaenarete, Socrates’ mother, who engages in dialogue with current day midwives and mothers.
